Tomáš Ctibor

“By chance, Martin and I were there in the Castle in Husák’s office on that 1 January, when Václav Havel watched his own speech in television. The other people present were, I think, Joska Skalník, John Bok, I think the Kohouts were there, that kind of type, any way. The office was in its original state, just as it had been under Husák, and there was a waiter who cruised around, offering us pineapple juice - and I had never drank pineapple juice before. That day Martin and I each drank about fifteen of those pineapple juices, because it was a really spectacular drink, and he’d always just peep in - I reckon he was more interested in seeing what was going on, he thought it completely absurd. And he always asked: ‘Does anyone want some more pineapple juice?’ And I always said: ‘Oh well, we’ll have another one then.’ For me, that was really the symbol that showed that the Communists were really gone and that things would be pretty decent from now on.”

“Those matters were basically in two parallel modes. On the one hand, you had things like, as I said, they could ‘perlustrate’ you in the street. It happened to us that a friend and I skipped school for two days when we were at university, and we went from the school to [the friend’s] cottage, not to laze around, but to paint, to make our landscapes for the semester, en plein air. And just because we were out and about in some village on a week day, and I had long hair, when we went to have lunch in a pub, before they brought us our food, the cops charged into the pub, scooped us up and took us away, immediately, that someone had called and said suspicious people were wandering around the streets. That was enough for them to detain you somewhere. And they started threatening us that they’d expel us from school, and they even started accusing us that we no doubt did drugs and stuff like that. Just a completely absurd situation.”